pex is a library for generating .pex (Python EXecutable) files which are executable Python environments in the spirit of virtualenvs. pex is an expansion upon the ideas outlined in PEP 441 and makes the deployment of Python applications as simple as cp
. pex files may even include multiple platform-specific Python distributions, meaning that a single pex file can be portable across Linux and OS X.
pex files can be built using the pex
tool. Build systems such as Pants and Buck also support building .pex files directly.
Still unsure about what pex does or how it works? Watch this quick lightning talk: WTF is PEX?.
pex is licensed under the Apache2 license.
To install pex, simply
You can also build pex in a git clone using tox:
This builds a pex binary in dist/pex
that can be copied onto your $PATH
. The advantage to this approach is that it keeps your Python environment as empty as possible and is more in-line with what pex does philosophically.
Launch an interpreter with requests
, flask
and psutil
in the environment:
Or instead freeze your current virtualenv via requirements.txt and execute it anywhere:
Run webserver.py in an environment containing flask
as a quick way to experiment:
Launch Sphinx in an ephemeral pex environment using the Sphinx entry point sphinx:main
:
Build a standalone pex binary into pex.pex
using the pex
console_scripts entry point:
You can also build pex files that use a specific interpreter type:
Most pex options compose well with one another, so the above commands can be mixed and matched. For a full list of options, just type pex --help
.
If you use tox (and you should!), a simple way to integrate pex into your workflow is to add a packaging test environment to your tox.ini
:
Then tox -e package
will produce a relocateable copy of your application that you can copy to staging or production environments.
More documentation about pex, building .pex files, and how .pex files work is available at http://pex.rtfd.org.
pex uses tox for test and development automation. To run the test suite, just invoke tox:
If you don't have tox, you can generate a pex of tox:
$ pex tox -c tox -o ~/bin/tox
To contribute, follow these instructions: http://pantsbuild.github.io/howto_contribute.html